Pinochet’s Legacy

The death of Chilean strongman Augusto Pinochet should not blunt the
work of healing the damage he has done and shining light on the truth.

December 14, 2006

Millions of Chileans got an unexpected gift December 10, on International Human Rights Day. The country’s 91-year-old former dictator, Gen. Augusto Pinochet, was plucked from this earth shortly after midday.

Marc Cooper left Chile under UN
protection eight days after the Pinochet coup. His memoir of the period,
Pinochet and Me, is now available in paperback from Verso.
Pinochet's Legacy

Many of us who survived General Pinochet’s dictatorship (I escaped Chile, where I had worked as a translator for Salvador Allende, the elected President overthrown by Pinochet) would have preferred the tyrant to have lived just a bit longer–long enough to stand trial on one of the multiple counts of murder, torture and kidnapping pressed against him as a result of his seventeen-year reign of terror. But greater forces intervened.

Pinochet’s very name came to symbolize all the horror that can follow when democracy is supplanted by dictatorship. Even now there are those who justify his brutal rule by citing statistics of economic growth. But there’s another, more chilling set of numbers that will forever define the Pinochet dictatorship: In a country of barely 11 million at the time he seized power, 3,200 were murdered by the state, more than 1,000 disappeared (some of them thrown into the ocean, others into pits of lime), tens of thousands were tortured and hundreds of thousands fled into political exile.

Pinochet also embodied a wave of authoritarianism that swept through all of Latin America during the time of his rule. Similar dictatorships imposed their own brand of fear as they clamped down on Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia and Peru. Encouraged originally by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger and then nurtured by the Reagan Administration and rising Thatcherism in Europe, Pinochet and the continent’s other allied military regimes instituted a savage free-market capitalism that in many cases reversed decades of social welfare reforms. At bayonet point, unions were outlawed, labor laws were abolished, universities were stifled, national healthcare and social security programs were privatized, and these already unequal societies were further stratified into rich and poor, strong and weak, favored and invisible.

Their network of terror, Operation Condor, coordinated from Santiago and encompassing intelligence agencies from neighboring countries, included assassinations from Buenos Aires to Rome to the streets of downtown Washington, where in 1976 Pinochet’s agents detonated a car bomb that killed Chile’s former US Ambassador Orlando Letelier and his associate, Ronni Moffitt.

But Pinochet’s legacy also stands as a monument to other, more uplifting, human values. The so-called Pinochet Precedent was born in 1998 when, during a visit to London, Pinochet was arrested on a Spanish extradition warrant for the alleged murder of Spanish citizens. His detention by the British was a historic turning point for international human rights: In a global era, no longer can violators of human rights roam beyond their borders with impunity.

It’s a precedent that should be seriously pondered by those in our own government who believe they can bend and break the rules of human dignity and international law and pay no price. Already, lawyers in the United States and Germany are asking the courts to apply the Pinochet Precedent to Donald Rumsfeld, Alberto Gonzales and other American officials who ripped a page from the Chilean dictator’s playbook and instituted practices of torture–from waterboarding to simulated executions–in US military detention centers.

Amazing and satisfying what a little justice can do. Once Pinochet had been captured, and after 503 days in British custody, his swagger had evaporated. He shrank from invulnerable strongman to wanted war criminal. Upon his deportation to Chile, two decades of social taboo were shattered, and he was indicted for murder by the courageous Judge Juan Guzmán Tapia. At the time of Pinochet’s death, more than 200 criminal accusations were still pending against him.

Pinochet departed the scene discredited and reviled. The nation he once ruled with an iron first has only partially recovered from the trauma he inflicted. But his legacy must continue to be examined and investigated. This magazine, its editors and readers have a proud history of standing on the front lines of efforts to shine light on Chile’s dark past.

Hundreds of murders and disappearances still seek resolution. There are still too many Pinochet collaborators and enablers who have not been called to account–and that includes Kissinger. The investigation into the murders in Chile of American citizens Charlie Horman and Frank Teruggi, two friends of mine whose lives were snuffed out in their youth, must continue. And the US government must release classified documents it still holds relating to Pinochet’s role in the Letelier-Moffitt assassinations.

So a brief timeout to dispose of Pinochet’s remains. Then back to the work of exhuming the truth.

Marc CooperMarc Cooper, a Nation contributing editor, is an associate professor of professional practice and director of Annenberg Digital News at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.
Cooper's career in journalism began in 1966, when he founded and edited an underground newspaper in high school in Los Angeles. After being expelled from the California State University system for his antiwar activities in 1971 by order of Governor Ronald Reagan, he signed on to work in the press office of Chilean President Salvador Allende. The 1973 military coup found Cooper working as Allende's translator for publication, and he left Chile as a UN-protected refugee eight days after the bloody takeover.
Since then Cooper has traveled the world covering politics and culture for myriad press outlets. He reported on the Yom Kippur War, Lebanon, South Africa, Central and South America, Eastern and Western Europe and domestic American politics for dozens of publications ranging from Playboy and Rolling Stone to the Sunday magazines of the Los Angeles Times and The Times of London.
Cooper was news and public affairs director of KPFK-FM (Los Angeles) from 1980-83 and has been a correspondent for NBC, CBC and Monitor Radio. For television, he has been a reporter and a producer of news documentaries for CBS News, The Christian Science Monitor and PBS Frontline.
Cooper's journalism awards include prizes from The Society of Professional Journalists and PEN America, and several from the California Associated Press TV and Radio Association.
An anthology of Cooper's work, Roll Over Che Guevara: Travels of a Radical Reporter, was published by Verso in 1994. He was also a contributor to the collection Literary Las Vegas, published in 1995 by Holt.
Returning to the system from which he was expelled, Cooper has also taught in the journalism departments at the Northridge and Los Angeles campuses of California State University.
His Pinochet and Me: A Chilean Anti-Memoir (Verso), is now available in paperback.